


four youtube videos daisy showed coulson (and one reel of celluloid he showed her)

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Coulson is Quake's Biggest Stan, Cousy Rewatch, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Related, Established Relationship, F/M, I have a lot of feels about Jiaying, Kink Negotiation, Light BDSM, Missing Scene, POV Skye | Daisy Johnson, Skye | Daisy Johnson-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 08:39:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12272841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: It starts when she decides to share the video of the puppy with vertigo.Written for the #CousyRewatch at johnsonandcoulson.com





	1. the puppy with vertigo

“You said it was important. What is _this_?”

“It’s a puppy with vertigo.”

She sees it - he almost rolls his eyes. But he doesn’t.

“I can see that,” he tells her. “Is this the important thing you wanted to show me?”

“Yes,” Skye says, leaning back and letting Coulson complete view of her laptop. To his credit he complies and watches the thing to the end. The wound above his eyebrow still looks way too fresh and it reminds Skye why she asked him to come to the common area with her. “It was a tough thing you had to do today,” she explains. “I thought you could use a pick-me up.”

She braces herself for a bad reaction, he’s a seasoned SHIELD agent and she knows it’s presumptuous to think she can help him feel better, or that he needs help after a tough mission. She doesn’t know how many times he has had to make a call like today, kill a man to save others. But in his face she can tell that no matter how many he’s done this it hasn’t become easy for him.

“It’s part of the job,” Coulson says, and it’s a stock line, but it sounds like he believes it.

“Don’t get me wrong I was super scared back there,” Skye admits. “But seeing you having to make that call… It must be way worse than being scared.”

“If you want to be a SHIELD agent, you’ll have to face these situations at some point.”

Skye bites her cheek, feeling guilty. She’s not sure what drove her to tell Ward she wanted to be a field agent when he offered to be her SO. She could have just said she was going to stick to comms, hack for SHIELD, that kind of stuff. She has to keep her goal in sight, and that goal is not becoming a SHIELD agent. 

“How’s training going, by the way?” he asks, casually. He’s a pretty hands-off boss, Skye realizes. She’s still a bit surprised he didn’t want to train her himself, since he was the one to bring her aboard. Not that she is dismissing Ward’s effort but, she’d be curious to see what kind of SO Coulson would be.

“Well,” she kind of lies, because she knows she hasn’t been the most committed trainee ever, but of course she can’t tell Coulson her reasons for keeping the distance. “The physical part is the worst, though. How did you do it?”

Skye hasn’t asked too many questions like this one. She has the feeling that knowing more about Agent Phil Coulson is only going to make it harder to think of him as a mark, as a means to an end. (She suspects that ship might have sailed already.)

“It helped that I played a few sports in high school,” he explains.

She snorts a bit. Somehow she can’t imagine Coulson as a jock.

On the screen the puppy falters and falls on its ass.

Skye speaks more seriously now.

“I hope if I’m ever faced with something like we saw today... I’ll be able to make the right choice…” she says, imagining a future when she’s the one who has to pull the trigger. “Like you.”

Coulson frowns. “Doctor Hall was a good man. He deserved better. SHIELD should have made sure he trusted us enough to come to us first.”

This is making things harder, Skye thinks. It was a bad idea to try to cheer him up with a silly YouTube video. She’s just making more trouble for herself, making it more painful when she eventually has to do what she has to do. There was no advantage to trying to make Coulson’s sucky day a bit better. Sure, maybe he’ll trust her more for this, but Skye refuses to let her brain work like that. She just wanted to… help.

Coulson, distractedly, clicks the video of the puppy again. 

“You’d probably agree with Hall,” he comments, not looking at Skye. “You’ve said it in your Rising Tide podcasts. We are not to be trusted.”

It doesn’t sound like an accusation, it’s just said softly and reflexively. Is Coulson wondering if they can be trusted? She knows he admires Hall’s desire to protect people, despite everything.

“Do you think the gravitonium is safe with SHIELD?” he asks.

It sounds genuine. He’s the guy who earnestly explained how SHIELD got rid of dangerous artefacts - that didn’t line up with what Skye knew about SHIELD. Coulson himself doesn’t line up with the idea she had of SHIELD.

“I don’t know. I hope so,” she answers. But she changes her mind, because for all the lies she is telling Phil Coulson, she wants to tell him some truth. “No. I don’t think the gravitonium is safe with SHIELD.”

Skye braces herself for a expression of disappointment, maybe anger. But Coulson keeps surprising her.

He smiles.

“That’s why I asked you to join the team,” he tells her.


	2. yoga for beginners

“I don’t think I can do that with my leg,” Coulson says, pointing at the monitor.

“No, me neither,” Skye agrees, crooking her head.

The lady on the video is attempting to Rubik-cube herself.

“How is this supposed to help anyone relax?” she wonders. “It’s stressing me out just to watch it.”

“It was your idea,” Coulson points out.

Right. She is supposed to be helping him. After he shared all that had been going on with him in the last few months suddenly it wasn’t just his uncharacteristically cold attitude towards her that made sense. Physically he has been different. Coulson had always been restless and kind of nervy (Skye always noticed how he had trouble keeping his hands still), but this was different - he looked… _itchy_.

They are in the gym, with her laptop balanced on one of the vaulting horses. It’s feels weird, Coulson’s presence in this place. This is where she trains with May, this is where she sometimes trains alone, before everybody wakes, trying to distract herself from stuff for months, punching the bag because she can’t help Fitz, punching the bag because Simmons is gone, punching the bag because Coulson wouldn’t talk to her, punching the bag because her worst nightmare is living and breathing only a few feet of concrete under her… It’s puzzling, Coulson seems out of context here, and he’s wearing one of his suits, making it even more surreal, and also that doesn’t seem like he’s very committed to her idea, does it?

Although her earlier suggestion of “try some yoga” was meant to annoy him mostly, make him realize this whole “I’m the Director, I must act cool” act was not necessarily as productive as he thought, it might still apply, now that she knows it was, of course, something else, something that had nothing to do with Coulson’s job title. 

Coulson had never meant to keep his distance from her, he just felt _he had to_.

The carving was creepy and it was putting Coulson in pain, and she wanted to help him take his mind off it for a moment, and help his body rest from the tension.

But of course it also meant Skye _herself_ would have some distraction. And she badly needs it.

_He_ is out there.

He is free and harming who knows how many people.

He is free and planning to do who knows what with Daisy.

Coulson told her what Ward had said about keeping his promise to her. She doesn’t expect that his creepy obsession with her will go away anytime soon. It makes her skin crawl. It terrifies her to think about it to the point where she can’t focus on her work. So she needs to not think about it. 

“Maybe I can do this one,” Coulson says, pointing at the exercise.

Skye chuckles a bit, imagining Coulson turning human starfish trying to copy this pose.

“I’m sorry, I thought this was going to help,” she says.

“No, it does, thank you.”

He stills sounds subdued, wary of looking Skye in the eye, acting humble. He must know she is still hurt that he hid things from her all those months. Skye is even more hurt by the uselessness of it all; she could have been helping him figure out a solution all this time. But she appreciates his contrition (big word, but that’s what Coulson looks like right now), and knows he means it when he says he will be honest with her from here on.

“Have you tried playing videogames?” she asks him. “Fitz and Mack have a pretty sweet set up in the common room, and it will keep your hands busy.”

Coulson winces a bit. “No, I don’t think that’s going to help.”

Skye looks around. 

“What about some old-fashioned punching the punching bag?” she offers.

“Tried it. Physical exertion only makes it easier for the…”

He trails off but Skye gets the idea. She’s been looking at his hands, how he keeps making fists and then letting go.

“Do you have to… are you feeling like carving tonight?”

Coulson shakes his head and tries a reassuring smile.

“It’s fine, I can hold it off a couple of days,” he says.

Skye knows he is lying, but this time it’s a lie he has every right to.

“I’ll send you the link to your computer,” Skye says, trying to be a little more helpful than she has been until now. “If you want to try yoga… on your own.”

She packs up her laptop, ready to stop intruding on Coulson when he’s visibly uncomfortable.

“Skye…” he stops her before she leaves. His expression tells her he also agrees he should have brought her in sooner, that he could have helped. Less contrition this time,more regret. “Thank you,” he simply says, and Skye leaves the gym.

She knows there’s no sleeping for him tonight. There’s no sleeping for her either - she will stay up in her bunk, studying the pictures Coulson has been giving her for months, but now with new eyes, with the knowledge of what they really mean. With the knowledge that maybe she can crack their mystery, not with pattern recognition software, but with something that belongs to her alone, that feeling of being pulled, the same she felt when she first saw the symbols on the Obelisk as it was killing Harley. She doesn’t want to face that possibility, didn’t want to listen to Coulson when he explained why they had been monitoring her, but she felt it again, when she touched the deep lines carved on the wall of his office a couple of nights ago. Once in her room she spreads the photographs over her bed, keeps skimming her fingers over the images, as if she could replicate that feeling. She will stay up all night doing this, but it’s still better than checking the algorithm she wrote to feed into security systems, cameras on train stations, city squares, better than checking the Playground’s security


	3. elevation

“What is that?” Coulson asks, catching sight of her image on the computer. He’s come in without knocking, but then again Daisy is making a point of keeping her door open these days.

“A musical video homage to Quake,” Daisy says, trying to deadpan, while her eyes are glued to the grainy images of her latest stunt of stopping some very bad guys from using a very dangerous alien weapon. 

“What?”

“Yep. Koenig sent me the link. A musical video homage to Quake,” she repeats and it’s one of those instances where she absolutely doesn’t recognize herself in the name.

Coulson sits on the edge of her desk, and joins her in watching the thing. Daisy thinks about just stopping the video (and/or destroying her computer, move to a different state, change her name again) but she suspects that would be even more embarrassed.

Coulson doesn’t seem to think this is embarrassing. He seems interested.

“They could have picked a better song,” he comments. Right now he looks like the personification of ‘popcorn.gif’.

“No kidding. U2’s Elevation?” Daisy cringes.

They chuckle. 

“Things must be settling nicely, if you have time to watch videos on YouTube,” Coulson teases her. Daisy rolls her eyes. “I certainly could never do that when I was Director.”

“Cut it out,” Daisy tells him, shoulder-checking him gently. He knows how she feels about the title, at least so soon, and he’s trying to make light of it.

“Yes, sir,” he says, in a jokey humble tone.

They watch the video to the end, even though Daisy has to look away at times from embarrassment.

But it’s nice to have a moment like this, after how crazy things have been. It’s also nice to be around someone who knew her when she was a hacker living out of her van, rather than the new recruits, for whom she is either _Quake_ or _Director_.

In a way she hates all of this, not the job, but stuff like knowing there are people making _fanvideos_ about her.

She minimizes the window before Coulson can read the comments under the video, feeling her heat on her cheeks just imagining the situation.

“I once asked Steve Rogers to sign my Captain America cards,” Coulson says, a non-sequitur, but a really interesting one.

Daisy turns in her chair, raising an eyebrow at the revelation.

“You did?”

“Right after we met,” he tells her.

“Straight up then? Wow.”

“It was very awkward.”

She loves the story but can’t see why Coulson is bringing it up. He sees that on her face, because he goes on.

“He was really mortified,” Coulson says. Then he gestures at the computer screen. “What I mean is - it’s normal to feel ambivalent about this stuff. It doesn’t make you any less of… Quake. But I can talk to Koenig and get him to stop sending you links.”

She smiles. She is trying to mentally gloss over the fact that he just compared her to Captain America.

“Thank you. But you’re not the Director anymore,” she tells him. “You don’t have to take care of me.”

“What I remember - vividly - about being Director of SHIELD, is how some of my agents looked out for me, even if that wasn’t their job.”

Daisy leans back on the chair, crossing her arms, Directorial style, she hopes, and giving Coulson a look. His soft expression is different from what she is used to, in a way, and she wonders if things are really going to change between them, now that she is technically her boss. Not necessarily in a bad way, but change always makes her restless.

What _she_ remembers that indeed that had been her job, all those years. But that she would have done it anyway, even if it hadn’t. _Oh_.


	4. the art of tying knots

Coulson is kissing her neck, and intentionally trying to tickle her. It’s working. She likes his gentle impatience right now.

“Sorry I’m not a sailor,” she is saying, narrowing her eyes at screen. “I don’t anything about knots.”

She feels a bit bad about it, since she is the one who wanted to do this in the first place. Coulson is already in his underwear and t-shirt, and Daisy feels guilty for stalling. But she wants to get it right.

“It’s just a tie,” Coulson points out. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she explains, distractedly, because that should be obvious. None of her previous boyfriends had wanted to do that - or rather Daisy hadn’t asked. So she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do, and she worries about safety.

“That’s sweet,” Coulson says, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek.

“You’ve done this before, right?” Daisy says. They’ve talked about this before and she was a little relieved (and zero surprised) at the revelation. “Do you know how it’s supposed to go?”

She watches Coulson blush a bit.

“Sorry,” he shrugs. “I was never the person doing the tying. I was always the tied-ee.”

That makes as much sense to her and her request made to Coulson. Entirely too much sense. Daisy gives him a sideways smile, thinking about the surprising advantages of getting to know someone so well before starting a romantic relationship with them. Who knew, uh?

Meanwhile, the nice dominatrix lady in the green wig on the screen is wrapping one side of the tie over the other in a fashion that seems to Daisy more like modern art and less like maritime expertise gone naughty. It took her a bit to find someone who explied this with ties, rather than rope expressedly manufactured and bought for these occasions. There’s plenty of rope around the base, military grade, but Daisy doubts it can server softer purposes. Plus, she really wanted to do it with one of Coulson’s ties.

“I’m sorry. It’s not exactly sexy, me trying to figure this out with YouTube videos.”

Coulson kisses her shoulder.

“No, I think it’s pretty sexy.”

“You do?”

“It’s very… you. So yeah.”

She closes her laptop and pushes it out of the way.

“Okay, I think I’ve got it.”

Coulson offers his hands, trustfully, and a little too eager. 

She crosses one side of the tie over his wrists, starting like the video instructed, and Daisy knows YouTube is evil and all that, but crap, is it handy.


	5. home movies

He still looks pretty clumsy, trying to operate the film projector with his prosthetic. She knows better than to offer help, and she knows Coulson, how much he values getting back his autonomy little by little in these past few weeks. Skye looks away, not because she’s put off, but because it’s a sharp reminder of what her own mother provoked, a reminder of the sacrifices Coulson has been forced to make, just for knowing her.

It’s late in the night, it’s way too late, and they haven’t been alone too often lately (probably her fault, for the aforementioned “hey my mom tried to kill you all and you lost your hand” reasons). And they haven’t been alone discussing stuff that doesn’t have to do with their idea of creating a team of powered people.

“What is all this?” she asks, as Coulson finishes mounting the reel of film on the projector.

“When we were investigating Whitehall, or rather, Doctor Werner Reinhardt, we found a lot of old Hydra memorabilia stored in this base,” he explains, an audible distaste running through the word _memorabilia_. “And in other bases. It has taken us a bit to check and index everything.”

“Coulson, I don’t understand…”

He touches her shoulder. It’s the first time he touches her since the day she left Cal in his practice. But that day, when they were back in the base, he had held her tight, even with one arm, and tonight the touch was tentative, fleeting. It’s such a light pressure, guiding her to a chair.

“I’ve been debating if I should show you this,” Coulson tells her. “But… the other option was hiding it from you.”

“Hiding what?”

He switches the light of the projector on, a square of white on the smooth wall of his office.

“Whitehall’s home movies. Made for archival purposes,” he says and Skye sits on the edge of the chair, a shiver running through her spine, Nazis and _home movies_ , not a combination you want. Coulson guesses what she is thinking and shakes his head. “No, not that kind. Just people he imprisoned, catalogued. Nothing of the experiments.”

Skye breathes out, but still she’s too slow to get Coulson’s meaning just yet.

“Skye… there are images here of your mother.”

His words, gently and kindly as he says them, cutting through Skye and fill her throat with something cold and metallic.

“My…?” she trails off, not wanting her voice to betray her, not in front of Coulson, not in front of one of Jiaying’s victims.

“Do you want me to-?”

“Yes, please.”

Because she is still curious. Because she is still the same Skye who infiltrated SHIELD on the off-chance that she might find a shred of information about her parents. She’s met them now, but that curiosity hasn’t dwindled. If anything it’s greater now.

Coulson turns off the office lights and starts the film.

It’s one of those without sound, because the reel didn’t have enough space for another track. It makes everything more eerie, the lack of human noise, just the continuous drumming of the projector turning its gears in the background.

Coulson takes a seat by her side, but at a respectful distance. He acts like this is a private moment but Skye disagrees. Since the moment she showed Coulson that redacted SHIELD file on her parents he has been intrinsically tied to her search for them. And both Skye’s parents had tried to kill him, he sort of earned his place here.

Skye scans the images, but at first Jiaying is not there. A group of people, all of them Chinese, most of them at least in their 60s. The camera lingers on their faces, for identification purposes, no doubt but also to record their fear. Skye knows enough about Hydra, enough about how the minds and hearts of men who enjoy exerting power over the weak work, to know that was the intent.

And suddenly she is there on the screen. 

Her mother.

And yet she looks nothing like the women Skye knew for a handful of days. She looks nothing like the woman who tried to kill her on the deck of that ship.

The eyes.

It’s the eyes. They are completely different. They look both older and younger than the eyes Skye knew. The same wisdom but… something softer underneath. She looks scared, but not like the rest of her people. Anyone could tell she is extraordinary. It’s tempting to understand Cal, the horrible things he did for her, looking at these scraps of celluloid.

She looks brave and young and tired. She looks old and unbreakable. Skye knows that last part is a lie. But she shifts to the edge of her seat, wanting to drink more of it, her face, the way those intelligent eyes moves across the room, defiant of her captors.

And then it’s gone, a new shot, the framing wider, so the camera can take in the whole group again. Jiaying is still there, Skye’s eyes follow her movements, but she can’t see her face clearly anymore. From the distance she might look like the Jiaying she met and lost. But now Skye knows the truth.

“SHIELD found this hideout not long after this film was made, and your mother was freed with the others,” Coulson explains. “But Whitehall never gave up trying to find her.”

Skye feels hot tears running down her cheeks, and she is ever so grateful Coulson switched off the lights. She would wipe them, but that would only draw attention to the fact. She would wipe them but she thinks she owes Jiaying at least a couple of tears.

The Hydra cameraman moves on, searches other faces, trying to capture more fear. And soon it’s over, the little reel of film comes to its end. Nothing left, except the square of light on the smooth wall of the office. Except the imagined forever carved in Skye’s mind from now on.

The light of the projector is enough to betray her now. She can feel Coulson’s gaze on her and she remembers to feel guilty about the tears. But when Coulson speaks next his voice has no recrimination, not even a hint of ambiguity.

“You mother wasn’t always a monster. They forced her to become one. It wasn’t her fault. And Skye… it wasn’t your fault either.”

His voice sounds like he might as well be wiping her tears with his fingers.

Skye swallows.

“Daisy.”

“What?”

“ _Daisy Johnson_. It’s the name she and Cal wanted for me. I’ve decided to start using it. I owe it to them.”

Coulson nods.

“Daisy,” he repeats, like trying it out, or tasting it. “It might take me a bit to get used to.”

She smiles at him. “Yeah, me too.”


End file.
